\$124 million Series A

Thesis

 Historically, there have been two major tech-driven transformations; advancements that have been “powerful enough to bring us into a new, qualitatively different future”: the agricultural and industrial revolutions. These “general-purpose” technologies fundamentally altered the way that economics worked. In the short period that computers have existed, machines have already exceeded the intelligence of humans in some aspects, leading some to believe that artificial intelligence (AI) is the next general-purpose transformation.

 Source: Our World In Data 

 Like the shift from hunter-gatherers to farming or the rise in machine manufacturing, AI has been projected to have a significant impact across all parts of the economy. In particular, the rise in generative AI has led to massive breakthroughs in task automation across the economy at large. Well-funded research organizations such as OpenAI and Cohere have leveraged proprietary natural language processing ( NLP ) models to be functional for enterprises. These “ foundation models” provide a basis for hundreds , if not thousands, of individual developers and institutions to build new AI applications .

 However, with rising competition between foundation model organizations, along with the general growth in AI adoption, ethical concerns regarding the rapid development and harmful use cases of AI systems have been raised. In March 2023, over 1K people , including OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, wrote a letter calling for a six-month “AI moratorium”, claiming that many AI organizations were “locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control.”

 In February 2024, Musk sued OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman over “breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests in developing artificial intelligence ahead of the public good.” Though the lawsuit was dropped in June 2024, Musk’s allegations underscore the delicate balance between speed and ethics in the development of AI. These concerns have only intensified as models have grown more powerful, with the release of increasingly powerful models, including Anthropic's Claude 4 family in May 2025, which required the first-ever Level 3 safety classification. Both the remarkable capabilities being achieved and the introduction of new safety protocols underscore the growing need for responsible development practices.

 Amongst foundation model developers, Anthropic has positioned itself as a company with a particular focus on AI safety and describes itself as building “AI research and products that put safety at the frontier.” Founded by engineers who quit OpenAI due to tension over ethical and safety concerns, Anthropic has developed its own method to train and deploy “Constitutional AI”, or large language models ( LLMs ) with embedded values that can be controlled by humans. Since its founding, its goal has b

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